ATI's new family of graphics processors is finally born. It took the company a couple of years to develop Shader Model 3.0 graphics architecture and several month of re-spinning the chips to deliver products that run at nearly extreme clock-speeds. Let's find, what the RADEON X1800 XT, 1800 XL, 1600 XT and 1300 PRO are capable of!

RADEON X1600 XT manages to get only to the level of GeForce 6800 in pixel shaders 1.4 test. And it looks quite logical to me: there are quite a few textures in this benchmark, so the four texturing units of the new RADEON can certainly limit its performance significantly.

I have to admit that the failure in 3DMark03 test dealing with pixel shaders 2.0 performance looks quite strange to me. The workload in this test is mostly math1ematical, and since RADEON X1600 XT has 12 pixel processors working at 590MHz, the results should theoretically be much higher than that. Maybe it is the raw CATALYST drivers that are to blame here.

Similar test but from 3DMark05 testing set puts everything in the right place. RADEON X1600 XT becomes the leader, although it doesn’t get too far ahead of GeForce 6800. Looks like there are some evident drawbacks of the RADEON X1000 modular architecture: ATI seems to have deprived its RV530 of too many useful things, trying to make it as compact and economical as possible.